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On the umpteenth weekend, he dedicated himself to firing tweets in bursts, between full squares, sweaty rallies, golden conferences, the usual ice spray against migrants and the usual hymn to Made in Italy this time dedicated to the masters of Murano glass , Matteo Salvini’s tweet. The one who has had the most gratitude, the one that has collected the most hearts, is the kiss in a tuxedo with his girlfriend Francesca Verdini, on the boat in the Venice lagoon, going to the Venice Film Festival. Text: “Good morning friends!” and the emoticon of a bright sun. More than three thousand little hearts, ten times above the average that is also Altina.
Even the “good night friends” the night before, always with his girlfriend and in their tuxedos, had gone strong, two thousand five hundred little hearts. But the kiss more. That kiss, from the point of view of satisfaction among the followers of the leader of the Northern League, is unattainable. It must be said that Salvini is not new to mixing the public and the private in social networks with considerable ease and that the term “kiss” or dance “often comes back in his speeches when saying goodbye; after all, the end of his previous love story was announced by the ex with an intimate photo, between the sheets, he asleep. But it was she who posted, he suffered. This kiss in the lagoon, on the other hand, is different: it is not stolen, and probably It is not spontaneous, it is wanted, it is thrown; it is not even a selfie, there was a photographer who took it and someone, next to him, who had calculated the effect in terms of likes.
But is it just gossip, modestly coined as many say, or is it politics too? The question is not strange. Kissing has always been an element of political communication: there are very serious studies on the kiss in the Roman Empire and it dates back to the Assyrians and Babylonians. But they were different kisses. The kisses with a precise political meaning, in the sense that we give politics, are those of the years of the cold war between the Soviet leaders: then there was a coded ritual, three kisses alternating the cheek, and the chroniclers of the Kremlin used to measure its duration. looking for meanings. The quintessential kiss of that period was that of October 5, 1979 between Brezhnev and the head of the German Democratic Republic Honecker. A kiss on the mouth. “A sensual and grotesque kiss”, as defined by the French photographer, who immortalized it in black and white. A kiss that became a mural, in turn very photographed, on the Berlin Wall, and then an icon, replicated for forty years with different protagonists, from Trump-Putin to Salvini-Di Maio when the yellow-green government left .
In Italy we do not have this tradition and we remember a couple of political kisses: Occhetto’s to his wife in 1988, a stolen photo, which was considered a “humanization” of politics, just before the turning point of Bolognina that would have led to the end of PCI; and the only one, imagined, perhaps boastful, but charged with political consequences, between Giulio Andreotti and Totò Riina.
In short, these are completely different kisses than the one that, almost Hollywood, exhibited on social networks Matteo Salvini, which is quite similar to those that have always characterized American politics where the “first lady” is an essential element of history, or the narration. There they remember the kisses between John Kennedy and his wife Jackie; Reagan’s fans with Nancy, the Bush and Clintons’ cold, the one-minute kiss on the stage of the Democratic convention between Al Gore and his wife; Even Barack and Michelle Obama, who perhaps are and still are the best at this type of cocktail: their kiss at a basketball game in the United States made her husband’s polls jump during the re-election campaign, showing that yes, in certain contexts. Especially due to social media, even the kiss is political.
In short, that kiss in the lagoon, which Salvini’s opponents will have detested, is not an accident, it is not a coincidence, it is not a slip: but it is not history either. It is just a narrative.
